[TriLUG] Re: [TriLUG] Re: RH 9 install & bad ram

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 10:29:13PM -0400, Nathan Conrad wrote:
> Swap is helpful when you run programs that use up a lot of RAM by
> reading in large amounts of data at one time. It is also helpful to
> run many programs at the same time. The operating system will decide
> which pieces of data in RAM are not being used and store them on the
> hard drive. The OS will then automatically read them from the hard
> drive when they are needed.

This brings up a good point. A lot of sci compute machines simply don't
enable or even allocate swap at all. Google doesn't on their db farm.
Further, there are [Open]Mosix patches that simply rip out the kernel's
OOM killer; and Red Hat (via Alan Cox and Robert Love) has the
overcommit settings.

> USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
> root      4157  1.9  8.9 73844 45772 ?       S<   Jul14  36:44 /usr/bin/X11/X :0 -deferglyphs 16 -nolisten tcp -auth /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth vt7
> 
> Look at the VSZ "Virtual Size" column. It shows that X is using about
> 70 MB of RAM on my machine.

Actually you should look at the RSS column to get a better idea (this is
a faq in #xfree86). The VSZ column also includes any cached pixmaps and
mapped libs. Here is a quick hack by Juliusz Chroboczek for a rough
idea:  http://www.sh.nu/~crimsun/analyse-x.pl

-- 
Daniel T. Chen          crimsun at fungus.sh.nu
GPG key:   www.sh.nu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc
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